Global News (02/27/09)

– Britain admits rendition of terror suspects (Times Online):Gordon Brown was under growing pressure to hold an independent inquiry into Britain’s complicity in torture last night after ministers admitted that terror suspects detained by British soldiers in Iraq were secretly flown by the US to Afghanistan.

– Dear Mr. President, With All Due Respect …. (Mike Shedlock):
With all due respect Mr. President, The United States spends more on its military budget than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined; The United States accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending; The United States spends on its military 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran. Isn’t that enough Mr. President?
With all due respect Mr. President, the downfall of every great nation in history has been unsustainable military expansion. Mr. President, the US can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman. You act as if we can. Mr. President, can you please tell us how we can afford this spending?

– Citi Gets Third Rescue as US Plans to Raise Stake (Bloomberg):Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government ratcheted up its effort to save Citigroup Inc., agreeing to a third rescue attempt that will cut existing shareholders’ stake in the company by 74 percent. The stock fell as much as 37 percent.

– US economy suffers sharp nosedive (BBC News):The US economy shrank by 6.2% in the last three months of 2008, official figures have shown, a far sharper fall than had previously been reported. Plunging exports and the biggest fall in consumer spending in 28 years dragged the figure down from the 3.8% estimate the government gave earlier. The decline was much worse than analysts had expected.

– Bangladesh sends in tanks to quell mutiny (Telegraph):The Bangladeshi government has sent in tanks to tackle a mutiny by the Bangladesh Rifles border security guards which has left more than 50 dead, including senior army officers.

– Housing Bailout Déjà Vu (National Review Online):
Congress is poised to hand the Obama administration a housing-bailout bill that looks eerily like the ineffective one passed last year. Before that happens, we might want to ask Fannie and Freddie what happened to the first $200 billion we gave them.

– Future is ‘bleak’ warns Joschka Fischer (Telegraph):Joschka Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor, has issued a bleak assessment of Europe’s prospects for surviving the financial crisis, warning that leaders of a “self-weakening” continent are failing to come to grips with its decline.

– Global crisis hits Swedish economy hard(Financial Times):
Sweden is in the middle of a much more serious recession than previously thought, according to official figures for the fourth quarter of last year that revealed the economy contracted by nearly 10 per cent on an annualised basis.

– Lloyds confirms £10.8bn HBOS loss (Financial Times)
Lloyds, which rescued HBOS last year, had been expected to reveal that the government was insuring up to £250bn of the bank’s assets.Meanwhile, the Financial Times has learnt that Barclays has also sounded out the government about potentially participating in the asset protection scheme.

– It is time to resist(Guardian):
David Omand’s national security strategy report shows us we have a very short time to save society from tyranny.
“Once an individual has been assigned a unique index number, it is possible to accurately retrieve data across numerous databases and build a picture of that individual’s life that was not authorised in the original consent for data collection,” says Sir David Omand in a report for the Institute for Public Policy research. This is not some wild fantasy. It is the world that we are about to move into and which Jack Straw’s coroners and justice bill, the ID Cards Act, RIPA laws and the EBorders scheme have patiently constructed while we have been living in an idiots’ paradise of easy money.

– We’re on the brink of disaster (Salon):
Violent protests and riots are breaking out everywhere as economies collapse and governments fail. War is bound to follow.

– Greenland’s Ice Armageddon Comes To An End (The Resilient Earth):
One of the catastrophic results of global warming always cited by climate change alarmists is the melting of the ice sheets covering Greenland. Some even speculated that global warming had pushed Greenland past a “tipping point” into a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and rapidly rising in sea levels. Now, from the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, comes word that Greenland’s Ice Armageddon has been called off.

– French professor sacked over 9/11 conspiracy theory (Russia Today):An academic in France has been sacked by the Ministry of Defence after questioning the official version of events surrounding the 9/11 attacks. He now reportedly plans to sue the government.

– UK rules out charges against Pentagon hacker (Reuters):
A British court ruled in 2006 that he should be extradited to the United States to face trial. If convicted by a U.S. court, he could face up to 70 years in prison. McKinnon has been battling the British court decision ever since.

– Fluoridation scheme could go England-wide (Guardian):
City of Southampton to get first water fluoridation project in 25 years despite 78% opposition in consultation(The combination of chlorination and fluoridation causes heavy damage to the DNA.)

– New Study Finds GM Genes in Wild Mexican Maize (Soyatech):
New Scientist — February 21, 2009 — Now it’s official:genes from genetically modified corn have escaped into wild varieties in rural Mexico. A new study resolves a long-running controversy over the spread of GM genes and suggests that detecting such escapes may be tougher than previously thought.